Canada’s airports may not exactly meet all the qualifications of a gulag archipelago, but they are arguably our single most significant institutional reminder of liberty lost.Those who find such a claim slightly excessive should spend extensive time travelling, as I do, by VIA Rail and then return to air travel via one of our major landing strips.The contrast is experienced with particular sharpness by routinely coming and going from Toronto’s downtown Union Station, then abruptly submitting to the horrors of Pearson Penitentiary Airport situated, entirely appropriately, in the nightmare of modernity that is Mississauga.But ultimately it’s not a matter of geography, architecture, or airport/airline personnel. It’s the airport as institution that is emblematic of freedom foregone.When I refer to airports as institutions, by the way, I mean the word as it is commonly used on the nameplates of penal institutes rather than in its sense of organizations of established activity such as religious orders, democratic bodies etc
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Airports and . . . Train Stations? Where Freedom is Put Out to Pasture